One thing that has always bothered people about the World Economic Forum (WEF) is how aesthetically disagreeable it can be. Its style seems deliberately outre. Why does Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s impresario and MC, dress up like a cultic high priest? Why does Yuval Noah Harari – the organisation’s court philosopher – make slightly gleeful dismissals of the idea of human rights? “Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find the blood, you find the heart, and the lungs and the kidneys – but you don’t find any rights.”
Why this dogged insistence on giving people the creeps? Fundamentally it’s an affectation. The showy amoralism of the WEF is in fact a personal branding exercise, one that arose in response to the first real stirrings against its worldview in the middle of the last decade.
These conflicts after 2016 have been cast in a certain way – not least by Davos itself. What ‘populism’ was objecting to, it was said, was economic and technological modernity. The world was being ironed flat by a ruthless process of economic optimisation that had begun in the 1980s, one in which all the old social institutions that might inhibit the free-flow of capital were to be swept away. What populism meant, then, was a romantic but essentially doomed revolt by those who had been squeezed out.
Armed with this idea, the WEF and its extended class of hangers-on have worked up a kind of equal and opposite anti-romanticism: amoral, bloodless and smirkingly technocratic. If populism represented the past, then the WEF represented the future. One aspect of this is an affected elitism: even the WEF’s website now makes a wry reference to its reputation as a clubhouse for ‘distant elites’.
More significantly, this personal branding allows the WEF and the orthodoxy it represents to take up the mantle of pragmatism, realism and modernity. Even the wobblier parts of this worldview, like mass migration or degrowth economics, could now be cast as simple historical inevitabilities, part of a general trend of bloodless rationalisation all over the world. These things were inexorable and therefore unanswerable; in this the WEF was only the bearer of bad news for the populists. Hence Schwab’s space-age getup.
Opponents of this worldview have been strangely willing to take Davos at its own conceit. Many are content to play the role cast for them: doomed rebels of the ‘heart’ against the unfeeling ‘head’.
And a conceit it is. Scratch a Davos attendee and you’ll find a gooey moralism and a generalised fear of any kind of material change.
For one, the WEF has never met a new technology that it likes. Davos is only beginning to recover from the rise of the internet, which decentralises information and so acts as a solvent to consensus. The average ‘left-behind’ white proletariat in Brandenburg, or Hénin-Beaumont, or West Bromwich has eagerly seized on the internet as a means of political communication; he or she wields it with much more savvy than, say, Angela Merkel. To people like the latter the internet is only sinister; what it puts at stake is not merely a particular consensus, but the very concept of truth itself. It’s always been the Davos line, then, that the internet must be bowdlerised in order to rebuild old solidarities.
Artificial Intelligence, too, is simply another subversive element to gut. Again, new technology is only something that’s allowed insofar as it shores up reigning social structures. What the WEF’s reaction to AI represents isn’t peevish regulationism but downright alarmism – one that draws heavily on the apocalyptic predictions of Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Effective Altruists. Sure enough, the topline recommendations from this year’s conference were for governments and the private sector to put “ethics and responsibility”, not commercial application, at the “forefront” of their AI policies. AI is something that really does threaten to dissolve the old certainties, economic and otherwise; but it’s Davos that’s leading the charge against it.
Think back also to one of the WEF’s more menacing slogans: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” The accompanying essay imagines a future society in which all modern conveniences are shared. But this is just another kind of atavism. The clamour for shared canteens, group constitutionals and mandatory kumbayas isn’t new; it was the stock-in-trade of the romantic and agrarian communal experiments of the 19th century – like the barracks-cum-school Phalanstère of Charles Fourier. These kinds of social wheezes are, above all, a reaction against the anomie of modern life; the objective here is to rebuild solidarities that industrial capitalism has destroyed. Every vision of society offered by the WEF defaults to this same crude Fourierism: Ida Auken’s essay; Stakeholder Capitalism; The Great Reset (2020). It takes a lot of nerve, then, for Davos to accuse its populist opponents of harkening back to some sort of frumpy communitarianism.
And whatever Noah Harari may pretend, the Davos worldview is one that’s steeped in the language of universal human rights. Despite the conceit of bloodless rationalisation, during the pandemic Davos never questioned the idea that all human lives – no matter how many years were left to them – were equally valuable, and so must be protected with a Lockdown that collapsed global trade overnight. The old concerns about interconnected ‘just-in-time’ supply chains were dropped in an instant. Nor is mass migration ever subject to any kind of cold accounting at Davos. Third World immigration does not add to Western exchequers, but for the WEF that is beside the point. For Davos this isn’t about cheap labour (its proposals never include simple Gulf monarchy-style work permits) but the universal brotherhood of man; a maximisation of total global welfare for which Western taxpayers are obliged to foot the bill.
What Davos’ affected amoralism occludes, then, is that this worldview doesn’t represent an unfeeling new modernity, but rather an egalitarian moral project which is anti-modern in its assumptions. So when Davos plays the card of technocracy and thin-lipped realism, its opponents should not take it at its word. Because what we see from Davos isn’t “All that is solid melt[ing] into air”, but the search for a deadening new solidity.
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It is all by the by now. In 2019 a decision was made to allow direct rule by the banks and corporations and here we are. The governing party is utterly irrelevant. Every word they spew would be uttered by their opposition but couched a bit differently. There is no escaping fundamental power relations and how they have changed. This is the first tep to dismantling them. I would say at current reckoning it will take about three decades to develop a true spiritual resistance. All the while everything that makes life bearable will be crumbling at an accelerating rate. All you can do is keep spirits up in yourself and the people around you. It never came with a promise of ease or happiness or fulfilment but there was a promise that you would feel alive if you chose to do so.
Good article. The tories have lacked leadership with a pair of bollocks since Margaret Thatcher. Greedy, self-serving, spineless bastards – the lot of them. (* there are one or two honourable exceptions).
They are not “embarassed to be conervatives” they have not been conservatives for decades. The shock to their members is they have not been Conservatives, although there has never been a coherent philosophy about that or what it means.
They have been, as you say, keen to avoid a “scene”. They friends and associates and many (mpost?) of the Parliamentary party were on the side of woke, high tax, net zero and all the rest of the damaging mess.
The Conservative Party will not change. It is in too deep on all this stuff and its elected representatives will not tolerate change any more than they would allow a proper Brexit. As the GE approaches they will huff and puff and pretend all this was nothing to do with them. The ECHR, UK Courts, EU, UN, HoL and any number of other points of resistance will be given as excuses but it won’t wash. Even their own members don’t accept it.
As Peter Hitchens memorably pointed out on Question Time when talking about gay marriage, Cameron hates his own supporters.
Fascinating article for anyone who cares about the tories or the current political system or thinks that our system is anything but a show to keep the masses mesmerised and subdued.
If you are awake in the world, it all looks like the pantomime that it is.
The basic error in this piece is the presumption that Sunak, Hunt and globalist gang that usurped Truss actually care about being unpopular.
They don’t.
They’re banking on being less unpopular than Labour, but if Starmer gets in, he’ll just do more of the same.
Every day, in every way, the revolution gets nearer its globalist goal.
It’s up to us to expose, resist, disrupt.
Naive articles like this miss the message.
They don’t care about being unpopular with their members, the working class or other conservative and sane citizens.
They do very much care about being unpopular among the circle of likeminded managerial elite people they and their wifes, husbands and children move withinor aspire to do so.
They care about being popular with their fellow globalist swamp creatures, not the people.
It is a very simple game – keep the charade going on long enough so that you can get awat with all the spoils. This is a fundamentally flawed point of view because on a meta level the world that they luxuriate in depends completely on the thriving, at least on the surface, of a layer below.Just wise up we were all taken in at some point. That;s irrelevant because we are facing a serious attack on our spiritual home.
What the Tories have failed to realize is that the most important legacy of the Blair era is that New Labour is still running the country with an increasingly iron grip on everyday life regardless of who sits in Downing St 10 by virtue of all these quangos and charities stuffed with New Labour types which all act is if they had a mandate for enforcing general policies because they have the power to do so. The charade of the Hallet ‘inquiry’ would be a striking example of this.
We have to do something. If we allow this to continue then we aren’t even men enough to be guardians and we deserve everything we get. Serious people in this country need to acknowledge a sense of urgency.
Look at it in six months time given the defaults on mortgages and the homelessness engendrred by passed on rent costs. The whole situaton is a corrupt deck of cards. There will be no hiding from it when it collapses. We have only one option which is to fight as a nation that takes in and takes on allcomers. Obviosly if they give any indication of betryaal then we slice em up.
The Conservatives, or more certainly the executive realise that they are now nothing but play actors taking orders from elsewhere. As a consequence the likes of Fishy and Chunt couldn’t give a F. about the people of this country and so do not care one way or another about election results and as I keep repeating
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
The executive is now nothing more than a cabal of treasonous actors who are feathering their nests before taking flight.
Scum.
Fighting Marxist cultural warriors takes courage.
After 13 years of putting up with the blatantly biased, left-wing, BBC, the cowards in the Not-a-Conservative-Party still haven’t even got the courage to decriminalise a failure to pay the BBC’s Propaganda Tax.
Well over half of so-called Conservative MPs are carpet-bagger LibDems or Blairites, including the Prime Minister-with-no-mandate and the Chancellor.
I’ve never paid it. OTOH, I am genuinely uninterested in having my time wasted by TV producers and presenters.
Unpopulism? The correct expression is ‘intentional suicide’. This takes you to the burning question: Why?
Kemi Badenoch, by contrast, …… has been happy to stay in the Government through overturning Brexit, Lockdowns, Covid Jabs, Excess Deaths, Drag Queens, Rubber Dinghies, Net Zero, Ever higher Taxes, Woke Policing, Mutilating Teenagers on the altar of trans …..
“Thirteen years in which almost every public and private institution in the country has capitulated…”
Including the Tories.
Not thirteen years, right back to the final years of Thatcher, because the ‘Conservative Party’ was among the first to capitulate – hence the need to defenestrate the Iron Lady – and the emergence of that superannuated Sixth Former Cameron.
Time for a new party?
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/a-reply-to-dominic-cummings?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email